PandoraStrands

I love MyStrands Labs... you can always count on something cool popping up in there. I only have too complaints about it... 1.) I wish more of the things in there were integrated with the rest of the site and, 2) I wish I got alerted when new stuff popped up in there. I just subscribed to the Labs feed (and plugged it into me*dia*or too), so hopefully I have the latter taken care of now.

The latest addition is a mashup called PandoraStrands. It is a Firefox extension that integrates MyStrands real-time track-level recommendations, community and scrobbling with Pandora. While listening to Pandora, you just click on the little Muzika icon down at the bottom of the Firefox window. Up pops a window that gives surfaces recommended songs based on the one you are currently listening to. You can click on any of the recommendations to get taken to the MyStrands artist/track pages, or directly add one of the recommended songs as a seed to the station you are currently listening to in Pandora. Very slick.



You can also easily launch Napster to listen to any of the recommendations leveraging their freeplay trial. You can also quickly flip to the "Users" tab and see the other MyStrands community members that have recently listened to whatever song is currently playing on your Pandora station.

And of course all of the songs you listen to in Pandora are tracked and added to your MyStrands profile.

I've always felt like Pandora could benefit from some strong community features, and with PandoraStrands users can now get them. I'm guessing at some point this could be rolled into one of their other Firefox extensions that basically acts as a translation layer between many of the music profiling sites and provides you information on your musical similarity/affinity across different networks - for example, you can see how similar you are to someone on MySpace, Last.fm, Bebo or Friendster - even if that MySpace user doesn't have a MyStands profile. Ah, the beauty of open APIs...

UPDATE: As I think about it more, this would be exceedingly cool if integrated with Foxytunes (another favorite of mine). Really complimentary I think. Alex and Francisco... you guys should talk. :-)